Finalist: The Boston Globe, by Kevin Cullen

Greg Pizzute was driving his daughters home from a dentist appointment last week. The road from Savannah back to Fort Stewart in Georgia is straight and he kept his eyes trained in that direction, straight ahead, not wavering.

 

His wife, Brandie, sat next to him. Two of his daughters, Kayleigh and Bella, sat in the back seat, watching a “Cinderella’’ DVD, blissfully unaware of what their father was thinking.

 

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a pretty good boxer, and he fashioned himself a tough guy. He was so tough he was charged with assaulting his girlfriend.

 

Last Monday, tough guy Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother left bombs on the sidewalk on Boylston Street and killed an 8-year-old boy, a 29-year-old woman who grew up in Medford, and a 23-year-old Chinese graduate student at Boston University.

 

It takes a tough guy to pack a bomb with ball bearings and nails and purposely put it in a crowd so that it will kill and maim men, women, and children. The Tsarnaevs were so tough that when they decided to kill a fine police officer named Sean Collier on Thursday night, they approached him from behind and shot Collier in the head even before Collier could get out of his cruiser.

 

Get out the violins, because you’re about to read and hear all these stories about how poor Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s troubles had to do with the repression of the Chechens, and the hard nomadic life ethnic Chechens were forced to endure in the shambolic collapse of the Soviet Union.

 

Spare me.

 

Consider, instead, Lingzi Lu, the beautiful, loving Chinese woman killed in an explosion. She, too, emerged from the ruins of communism. She came from China’s rust belt, and when she got to America, she ran with it. She loved the different foods, the different cultures, the different people.

 

Lingzi Lu came here and saw only opportunity. Tamerlan Tsarnaev came here and threw his away.

 

Lingzi Lu nursed her friends at BU back to health when they were sick.

 

Tamerlan Tsarnaev nursed grudges, convinced we all owed him something.

 

Living in a society that respects and encourages diversity, he retreated into a perverse, self-righteous, judgmental view of others who didn’t share his extremist views. And in his final act of selfish venality, he enlisted for his nihilistic denouement his own little brother, brainwashing a kid who by all accounts had made the sort of friendships and social connections that he couldn’t.

 

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, had made something of himself. He was a captain of the wrestling team at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, where his friends recalled him as a class clown, a dutiful student, an ordinary kid who liked to smoke a bone once in a while. Presumably his marijuana smoking incurred the disapproval of his sanctimonious brother, who embraced an extreme form of Islam and railed against people who took a drink, or parents who exposed their kids to the paganistic trappings of Harry Potter.

 

The authorities believe it was Tamerlan, the zealot, who pulled his little and presumably impressionable brother into his orbit of overweening grievance against the very country that gave the Tsarnaev brothers more opportunity than they ever would have had if they had stayed in the troubled, poor country where they were born, Kyrgyzstan, or the troubled, poor country where their ancestors came from, Chechnya.

 

Kyrgyzstan is one of the poorest countries spawned by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands of its 5 million people bugged out of there in the years that followed the collapse of a system of government built on repression and corruption. It appears the Tsarnaev brothers, ethnic Chechens, began a nomadic trek that eventually brought them to Cambridge.

 

Cambridge is probably the most tolerant patch in these United States. It is a sanctuary city for immigrants. The people of Cambridge, the city government of Cambridge, have created the most inclusive, generous community to outsiders I have ever encountered. People in Cambridge go out of their way to be nice to, and genuinely supportive of, people like the Tsarnaev brothers.

 

I wouldn’t doubt that Tamerlan Tsarnaev encountered some jerks over the years. We all do. It’s called life. If Tamerlan Tsarnaev nursed murderous grudges because it was so hard to grow up and live in Cambridge, then he was indeed, as his uncle put it, a loser.

 

The police officers who took 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev into custody deserve our gratitude and maybe a medal. Maybe the kid will revert to the type of person his high school classmates remember, and he’ll do the right thing and tell all. Hopefully we won’t be submitted to the pathetic victimhood speeches tough guy Tamerlan would have delivered had he not received an unhealthy dose of bullets from police officers he was trying to kill.

 

Now that the madness is over, there will be some who say we have to figure out why the Tsarnaevs became such angry young men.

 

No one who lost his or her life or limbs on Boylston Street last Monday did anything to create angry young men like this. And I know that 8-year-old Martin Richard, a beautiful little boy from Dorchester who was killed by the Tsarnaev brothers’ bomb, never harmed a living thing. He was a kind little boy who was unfailingly nice to his classmate, the daughter of the Boston firefighter who knelt over his body on Patriots Day.

 

Sean Collier, the 26-year-old MIT police officer who police say was shot to death Thursday night by the Tsarnaev brothers, worked as a civilian for the Somerville Police Department, but desperately wanted to be a cop. He was thrilled when he got the call to join the MIT force last year, and he only recently learned he had landed his dream job with the Somerville PD.

 

I would bet my life that Sean Collier would have laid down his life for anybody, including immigrants from Kyrgyzstan or Chechnya. In the end, he did lay down his life, trying to protect others.

 

I don’t want to listen to how innocent people bear some responsibility for creating the twisted minds of the Tsarnaev brothers.

 

Let us first bury our dead, heal our wounded, tend to our damaged first responders. Then maybe I’ll listen to that “what did we do to make them hate us” claptrap. Then maybe I’ll go to some soul-searching debate about how our foreign policy is creating too many enemies and too few allies.

 

But then, maybe I won’t.

Jerry Foley, the great barman, cleared a table in the back on the lounge side of JJ Foley’s, the famous South End tavern, just after midnight.

 

The young cops, their faces a mix of exhaustion and relief, sat down heavily. They weren’t really there for the beer. They just wanted to sit. They just wanted to unwind, in a place where they didn’t have to train their guns on somebody.

 

They raised their glasses, to a job well done. A 19-year-old kid who held 1 million people hostage in their own homes was finally in custody, and maybe, just maybe, Bostonians will get some answers to why he and his disaffected 26-year-old brother decided to kill and maim innocents at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

 

“To Sean,” they said.

 

Sean Collier was a beautiful kid. All he ever wanted to be was a cop. He was 26 years old, and he was not only admired by the students on the sprawling urban campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was loved.

 

There was the young woman who was assaulted on campus. She was terrified about pressing charges. Collier sat with her and held her hand, and she made the identification, and they arrested her attacker.

 

There was the student who spoke directly to the murdered cop on a tribute page: “I am brown and a foreigner so usually American police make me a little nervous, but I recall passing by you one time and deciding that I liked you, because you looked unusually nice and trustworthy.”

 

But now Sean Collier is dead, assassinated as he sat in his cruiser by the Tsarnaev brothers, the murder that was the beginning of the end of the nihilistic rampage by a pair of men who turned on the very country that offered them sanctuary.

 

Another toast.

 

“To Dick,” the cops said. “To Dick.”

 

Dick Donohue, a Transit Police officer, lay in critical condition a few miles away at Mount Auburn Hospital, another victim of the murderous rage of a pair of brothers who spurned the welcome they got in Cambridge to leave a young cop fighting for his life in a hospital in Cambridge.

 

“They were in the academy together, Sean and Dick,” one of the young cops said, almost to himself. “What are the odds of that?”

 

Eddie Kelly, a very fine firefighter, stood with Richie Paris, president of Local 718 of the firefighters union, just to the side, a sad smile on his face.

 

“This is one of the finest days in the history of the BPD,” he said.

 

The cops nodded in appreciation.

 

“You see those guys,” Eddie Kelly said, turning to me. “Some of those guys were with us at the finish line, after the bombs went off. And they were there tonight, taking the bomber in. They didn’t kill him. They brought him to justice. I couldn’t be more proud of our guys.”

 

If it seemed odd that the most eloquent testimonial to the courage and tenacity and sheer professionalism of the Boston Police Department should come from a Boston firefighter, it shouldn’t. It might be a cliche to suggest they are a band of brothers, but they are. That band includes sisters, like the women cops from District 4 who were at the finish line the other day and dove in with their male counterparts. Theirs is a fraternity and sorority forged in the blood and wounds of the people they and the EMTs and paramedics of the Emergency Medical Services work together on a daily basis to save. That’s exactly what all of them were doing last Monday, when evil came to the Back Bay.

 

“Those guys have our backs,” Kelly said, gesturing over to the table of cops. “Same with EMS. We’re all in this together.”

 

Richie Paris said it was all well and good that the cops — not just Boston, but the State Police, the T cops, the Watertown cops, all the municipal departments — were greeted with cheers after they lugged Dzhokhar Tsarnaev out of that boat and into Beth Israel, where 12 of his victims lay in hospital beds.

 

“The Boston cops deserve all the praise coming their way,” Paris said. “But it would be better if the city would give them a raise. They should make as much as us. They haven’t had a contract for three years. You want to honor cops? Pay them a living wage so they can put their kids through college. That’s how you honor cops.”

 

It was an early night. Everybody was whipped. Brendan Walsh, a great young cop who would run through a wall to save anybody anywhere, was walking past the back door when he stopped and shook hands with a young EMS guy. They shared a word and then Walsh was out the door, back to a home he hadn’t seen in days.

 

“You see that kid Brendan said hi to on the way out,” Kelly said. “That kid and his partner were with us on a call this morning. We had a jumper.”

 

While Brendan Walsh and his BPD comrades were in Watertown, looking for the bomber, a distraught man was threatening to jump off the Washington Street bridge onto the Turnpike.

 

It was the same cast of characters who on Monday afternoon was saving lives on Boylston Street: the cops from District 4, the EMS trucks out of the South End, the firefighters of Engine 7, Tower Ladder 17, and Rescue One.

 

They talked the poor guy down — another life saved, far from the cameras in Watertown, far from the madding crowd.

When he was 6 years old, Sean Collier was sitting in a booth at a Papa Gino’s with his mother, Kelley, and his little brother ­Andy, having a pizza.

 

There was a woman in another booth, alone, and she was crying.

 

“Mum,” Sean Collier whispered, leaning across the table, “you’ve got to go talk to that lady.”

 

Kelley looked over at the woman and tried to reassure her son.

 

“Sean,” she said, “I’m sure she just wants to be alone.”

 

“Maybe she has no one,” Sean replied. “You’re a nurse, mum. Please go talk to her.”

 

Her conscience nudged by a 6-year-old boy, Kelley walked over to the woman and asked if she was OK.

 

“He was in the police academy, paying his own way, but somehow Sean scraped together $1,000 for that family.”

 

On Monday morning, as they prepared to bury their brother, the siblings of Sean Collier, the MIT police officer murdered by inexplicable ­hatred, asked me to listen to what they call Sean stories. They knew that people all over the world knew Sean was a dedicated, compassionate ­police officer. But they wanted people to know about the 27-year-old who was a loyal brother, a dutiful son, a doting uncle. They wanted people to know that in a sprawling family that grew up in a sprawling house in Wilmington, the second youngest of six kids was their moral compass. That the internal question asked so often by Joe Rogers, his wife, and their kids was, “What would Sean do?”

 

When he was a little boy, from the age of 3 or 4, Sean was obsessed with the American flag. He drew it constantly. With crayons. With pencils. With magic markers. And then he’d hand them out to family, friends, and total strangers.

 

From a tender age, he was an ­entrepreneur. He would gather rocks, paint them vibrant colors, then set them out a table on Lorin Drive and try to sell them.

 

“Sean,” his brothers and sisters told him, “no one is going to buy a painted rock.”

 

But he was irrepressible, and some people in the neighborhood couldn’t resist the ­earnest young Collier kid. They bought his rocks.

 

His sister Jenn Rogers and he were close in age, and they were inseparable as kids. They sat together on the big recliner in the living room, brother and sister, and they’d build forts with blankets draped across furniture.

 

Andy Collier looked up to his big brother Sean. Once, when Andy went to step on an ant in their kitchen, Sean stopped him.

 

“You can’t kill it,” 7-year-old Sean Collier told his brother. “It’s a living thing. Pick it up with a napkin and put it outside.”

 

Jennifer Lemmerman was always close to her brother Sean but they really bonded one summer, when Sean was in high school and Lemmerman was in college. They shared a summer job at a medical office in which they had to transfer a series of medical records into a computer system.

 

To pass the time, they listened to the radio, and at one point the station ran a fund-raiser for the Jimmy Fund. Sean was transfixed by the stories of little kids getting cancer and getting better.

 

“Sean was so profoundly ­affected by those stories,” his sister said. “He went home that night and made a donation. He was in high school. He didn’t have any money, but he set up an automatic withdrawal from his bank account. He had that automatic withdrawal until the day he died.”

 

His big brother Rob Rogers was in awe when Sean helped a family that lives down the street. The father had a stroke. The son got in an accident and lost his leg.

 

“He was in the police academy, paying his own way, but somehow Sean scraped together $1,000 for that family,” Rob Rogers said. “I still don’t know how he did it.”

 

Sean’s sister, Nicole Lynch, was the oldest and the first of the siblings to have children. When her oldest, 5-year-old Kailey, complained about getting glasses, saying it would make her look awkward, Uncle Sean came over for a visit.

 

“You look beautiful in those glasses,” he told his niece. “They make you look smart.”

 

Kailey smiled, and her uncle handed her a case that he had used when he wore glasses as a child. Kailey treasures the case and still keeps her glasses in it.

 

At MIT, Sean Collier looked after the students with the same paternal concern he had for his nieces. If some people dismissed some of the MIT kids as nerds, Sean was fiercely protective of them.

 

When a young woman was assaulted on campus and was terrified at the prospect of identifying her attack­er, Sean showed up and literally held her hand.

 

“When people say he was born to be a cop, they should know that didn’t start when he was 18,” Rob Rogers said. “It started at 3, when he began looking out for everybody.”

 

Sean Collier grew to love country and western music. One of the country music ­stations plays the national anthem at noon every day, and when­ever Sean was in his ­cruiser at noon, he would turn on that station and listen to the national anthem. The love of flag he developed as a little boy never left him.

 

And yet he was especially welcoming to the MIT students who came from countries where the police are not trusted. He won them over with his easy smile, a kind word, his remark­able ability to remember even the most unpronounceable names from far-flung lands.

 

His brothers and sisters sat there Monday, preparing to say goodbye a final time, and they smiled and laughed more than they cried because Sean Collier did so much in 27 years, and one thing he did was teach his siblings how to live a good life.

 

“I am so proud to be his brother,” Rob Rogers said. “He made me want to change the way I live. He made me want to be better to people, to protect people. He made me want to be like him.”

There were, in the days ­after the Patriots Day bombs, some profound ­moments, none more so than what unfolded in the chaos on Dexter Avenue in Watertown.

 

One of the bombers was down, felled by a great ­Watertown cop named Jeff Pugliese and mangled by his own moronic little brother, who ran him over in his haste to escape.

 

The gunfire over, Dan Linskey, chief of the Boston Police Department, had to make a decision: he saw a wounded Transit Police officer, Dic Donohue, down and his first ­instinct was to run toward him.

 

But seeing that Donohue was surrounded by cops who were working feverishly to save him, Linskey ran toward a terrific gang unit cop name Jared Gero, who was holding the handcuffed, fallen bomber.

 

“Be careful, Jared!” Linskey yelled. “He might be loaded!”

 

Together, they stripped the mortally wounded bomber, looking for an explosive device. They found none.

 

It was at that moment that Linskey reached for his belt.

 

Now, in many places in this world, someone in Linskey’s position would have pulled something else from the belt that held his holster. But Linskey pulled out his radio and called for an ambulance.

 

He tried to save the life of a man believed to have killed a beautiful little boy named Martin Richard, a lovely young woman named Krystle Campbell, and a ­delightful Chinese graduate student named Lu Lingzi. He tried to save the life of a man suspected of maiming scores of people at the Boston Marathon. He tried to save the life of a man he believed had killed a wonderful cop named Sean Collier. He tried to save the life of a man who, had he lived, would have stood in court and spewed some vile drivel about how the America that gave him sanctuary is a godless place of infidels, victimizing the dead and the wounded all over again.

 

A few days after Dan Linskey tried to save the life of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, I asked him why.

 

“Because that’s the difference between us and them,” he told me.

 

Compare the heroic actions of Dan ­Linskey and all the first responders and medical people to the shameful posturing of those yahoos in Worcester pretending that whatever happens to the body of ­Tamerlan Tsarnaev matters.

 

If you stood outside the funeral home of that poor undertaker who was trying to do the right thing, if you held a stupid handmade sign, if you wrapped yourself in an American flag and yelled nonsense into a TV camera, congratulations, because you did what Tamerlan Tsarnaev wanted.

 

If you are obsessed with the mortal ­remains of a despicable sociopath, congratulations, because you are keeping him relevant.

 

If you have verbally abused a Muslim ­because the bombers were Muslim, congratulations, because you have done what the bombers wanted.

 

If you are that guy in my hometown, Malden, who screamed at Heba Abolaban, a Palestinian woman wearing a head scarf, calling her a terrorist, congratulations, ­because you did exactly what the bombers hoped you’d do.

 

Abolaban is a doctor who has helped more Americans than the moron who abused her ever will. She said the Malden police officers who responded were gentle and kind, and I’m not surprised, because Malden Police Chief Kevin Molis is a good guy whose cops know whose side to be on. She appreciated that the mayor, Gary Christenson, called her.

 

If you are one of those drunken slobs who attacked Algerian-born student Amine Hadjeres outside a Back Bay restaurant last Saturday, I’m glad Amine popped you in the mouth. He’s a better American than you racist clowns ever will be.

 

Forget Tsarnaev. Stop doing his bidding.

 

And take comfort: He now knows there are no virgins in hell, much less 72 of them.

The only thing I have in common with Ireland’s Prime Minister Enda ­Kenny, besides a sheer, unadulterated love of everything about County Mayo, is that we’ve both incurred the wrath of a group of ­local zealots called the Catholic Action League.

 

These people would be deeply offensive if they weren’t so deliciously comical. They are self-righteous, self-appointed keepers of the faith, who especially like pointing out that a la carte Catholics — that is, most Catholics, who use contraception, don’t think gay folks are disordered, and believe that people should be allowed to get a ­divorce — do not belong in their church.

 

I have fallen afoul of the Catholic Action League many times, most recently when I had the audacity to point out that if Jesus Christ came back to earth he would have been appalled by the spectre of the recent papal election, in which more than a few of the cardinals voting amid much pomp and circumstance had protected predatory priests who raped children. I instead lauded four ordinary priests who should be, but never will be pope.

 

C.J. Doyle, the executive director of the Catholic Action League, took great offense at the column, suggesting in a letter to the editor that I was insulting the intelligence of “faithful Catholics” by trying to pass off my “dissident friends” as “real Catholics.”

 

That’s the Catholic Action League for you. Keepin’ it real.

 

Now, you may have heard the Catholic Action League demanded that Boston ­College rescind its invitation to poor Enda Kenny, the taoiseach, or prime minister, of Ireland to attend its commencement ­because he has proposed legislation, on the orders of Ireland’s highest court, that would create an exception to Ireland’s strict prohibition on abortion by making it legal for doctors to abort a fetus if it would save the life of the mother.

 

Pretty radical stuff, huh?

 

The caped Crusaders in the Catholic ­Action League love pointing out how hypocritical Catholics who use condoms and don’t chain their heads to parking meters outside abortion clinics are. They are less forthcoming when it comes to pointing out the hypocrisy of the Catholic bishops who will sit and sup at the feet of some of the worst enablers of sexual abuse in history.

 

Now, one of those bishops, the archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, also made some news by announcing that he agreed with the Catholic Action League, that he could not in good conscience attend the Boston College graduation next Monday at which the aforementioned Enda Kenny, prime minister of Ireland, is to ­receive an honorary degree and give the commencement speech.

 

O’Malley accused Kenny of “aggressively promoting abortion legislation,” which is an odd way to describe a democratically elected leader of a republic following the mandatory legal advice of the highest court in the land.

 

I would be the first guy to defend the cardinal’s right to skip the BC graduation. But his reasoning is embarrassingly flawed and his selectivity in whom he deems ­worthy of his presence is breathtaking in its hypocrisy.

 

Enda Kenny, as the duly elected prime minister of the Republic of Ireland, has a duty to respond to court decisions ordering his government to find an exception to ­Ireland’s strict prohibition against abortion so that doctors and other health care workers can take steps to save the life of a ­woman in a troubled pregnancy.

 

Women in Ireland have died because there is no exception to the law. Most recent­ly, it was a 31-year-old woman named Savita Halappanavar, a native of ­India who was working as a dentist in Ireland while her husband worked in Galway for the Natick-based firm Boston Scientific. When her husband learned the 17-week-old fetus his wife was carrying was non­viable, he begged the doctors to terminate the pregnancy to save his wife. The doctors pointed at the law, threw up their hands, and said there was nothing they could do.

 

When Praveen Halappanavar expressed exasperation that no one was lifting a finger to save his dying wife, someone tried to explain it by saying, “This is a Catholic country.”

 

An inquest last year found that Savita Halappanavar would most likely still be alive if the law in Ireland allowed for an abortion in that circumstance.

 

I am sure Cardinal O’Malley is sincere in his point of view that abortion is wrong, but I’d like to see him try to convince Praveen Halappanavar that non-Catholics like the Halappanavars have to abide by the Catholic Church’s edicts even if it means the death of a mother carrying a fetus that had no chance at life.

 

OK, enough of the Kafka­esque stuff. Let’s get back to the hypocrisy stuff.

 

Cardinal O’Malley won’t share a stage with Enda Kenny, a good man who is personally opposed to abortion but knows that his duty as the elected leader of a sovereign nation is not to impose his personal beliefs but to adhere to the Irish Constitution and the Irish people who embody that Constitution. But, while voting for pope, Cardinal O’Malley had no problem sitting in the same room as Cardinal Roger Mahony, the archbishop of Los Angeles, who belongs not in the Sistine Chapel but San Quentin for his shameless protection of predatory priests who raped children.

 

Needless to say, Cardinal O’Malley’s snub of Boston College and Enda Kenny is going down well with the Catholic ­Action League, but it’s also going down well with the Vatican, where the prime minister of Ireland is viewed as a dangerous heretic.

 

When the clerical sexual abuse crisis exploded in ­Ireland, it was a blast caused by the scandal that unfolded right here in Boston. Irish people ­began demanding answers. The adults who as children were beaten and raped and psychologically ravaged while under the care of priests and brothers and nuns in Catholic orphanages and workhouses demanded justice.

 

Kenny’s predecessor, Bertie Ahern, indemnified the Catholic Church in Ireland to the tune of $1 billion. So the taxpayers of Ireland, not the Catholic institutions who protected the predators, paid the bulk of the redress handed out to victims.

 

When Kenny became prime minister, he sounded a different tune. Two years ago, after the release of yet another report that showed how Irish bishops and the Vatican downplayed the rape and torture of Irish children by clerical predators, Enda Kenny found his indignation and his voice. He rose in the Dail, Ireland’s parliament, and accused the Vatican of caring more about maintaining its power than protecting children.

 

“The Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, the disconnection, the elitism that dominate the culture of the ­Vatican today,” Kenny said. “The rape and the torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, its standing, and its reputation. Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St. Benedict’s ‘ear of the heart,’ the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyze it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer.”

 

The bishops can try to say with a straight face that none of them should take to the stage with Enda Kenny because he is about to propose legislation to legalize abortion in some rare instances, but let’s be honest here: Kenny is hated by the Catholic hierarchy for that aching­ly honest and courageous speech he gave in the Dail in 2011.

 

Having reread the speech, I don’t think Boston College should be giving Kenny a ­degree. They should be giving him a medal.

 

Cardinal O’Malley is a very learned man, and he understands logic, and so by his logic I’m assuming he will not be accept­ing any money from all those well-heeled BC alums who are big donors to the archdiocese, because BC gives honorary degrees to people like ­Enda Kenny who want to save the lives of women who might die in difficult pregnancies.

 

Look, I was always fond of Cardinal O’Malley. I’ve written about him in very positive terms many times. He cares about the poor. But he’s lost me with this one. He and his self-righteous, preening acolytes in the Catholic Action League have staggered so far from reason and logic that it is hard to take any of them seriously anymore.

I would usually call him on the phone to set something up, but sometimes I would just show up at the rectory, in Turf Lodge, in West Belfast, and ring the bell. His greeting was always the same.

 

“Ach, Kevin,” Father Matt Wallace would say. “What about ye?”

 

He was a Wexford man, but he had lived in Belfast for so long you would think he was Antrim-born.

 

He smoked like a chimney. He took a drink. He loved to flirt with women. He would sometimes use words that, had I used them, I’d have to go to confession.

 

Once, I was driving with him down the Ormeau Road in South Belfast and he looked at his watch and shouted excitedly, “Pull over! Pull over!”

 

I did so, and Father Matt bolted from the car. He ducked into Sean Graham’s, the bookie shop, and emerged minutes later with a smile on his face and a betting slip in his hand.

 

“Jayziz,” he sighed, settling back into the front seat, tapping a pack of Marlboros, the only thing he ever asked me to get for him at the duty-free. “I almost missed that race.”

 

Father Matt’s humanity, his ordinariness, made him special, endearing him to the people of West Belfast, a place where there are no such things as big heads because if you have one, they’ll knock it off.

 

I met him when he was at St. Peter’s off the Falls Road in Divis, a neighborhood that suffered greatly during the Troubles. Over the years, between Divis and Turf Lodge, where he was pastor at Holy Trinity, Father Matt brought me into houses where people died too young, violently and needlessly. He was wonderful with people consumed with grief. He didn’t throw the Bible at them; he threw his arms around them.

 

After a young fellow was shot to death in cold blood in the warmth of broad daylight, Father Matt brought me to some boys who saw the whole thing. The boys told me, excitedly, how a hooded gunman stood over the guy and pumped bullets into him.

 

“His head bounced,” a 10-year-old boy named Padraig told me, and I looked to Father Matt and he just shook his head.

 

And, so, now, 20 years later, I’m sitting here thinking about that and everything else because of a phone call two weeks ago.

 

It was before dawn, and that is never good news.

 

“Did you hear about Father Matt?” a friend from Belfast whispered.

 

He apologized about calling so early, blaming his shock for forgetting the time difference.

 

But then the shock was mine. Father Matt Wallace, a great, empathetic priest, had killed himself.

 

It has bothered me for two weeks, and I don’t pretend to know what happened, but to paraphrase Yeats, Father Matt’s favorite poet, what if excess of love bewildered him until he died? There had to be a cumulative effect of the trauma and hurt and horrible things Father Matt saw.

 

Closer to home, I think of great priests like Father Jack Ahern and Father Doc Conway, who work with the poorest kids in Boston. I remember them comforting the mother of Jaivon Blake, a 16-year-old boy gunned down on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I remember them presiding over the memorial service at St. Peter’s in Dorchester with Rev. Gene Rivers, one of our great African-American preachers who give their lives to save kids.

 

Gene went home to his wife, and Father Jack and Father Doc went home to a rectory.

 

Father Sean Connor, a wonderful priest, comforted the Richard family, who suffered so grievously from the Patriots Day bombs, as he comforted all of St. Ann’s parish, all of Dorchester, all of us. He is old school, walking in Jesus’ footsteps.

 

But who comforts Father Sean?

 

So, in memory of Father Matt Wallace, Father Jack, Father Doc, Father Sean, if you know a priest, talk to him, thank him.

 

Tell him you appreciate everything they do.

 

Because they don’t hear it enough.